My2Cents

@infantrydort Did y'all see her update? x.com/i/status/20590…

Last night, I made a simple request on X. I asked if anybody visiting Arlington National Cemetery for Memorial Day would stop by Alan’s grave and leave a photo for our family. What happened next honestly caught me off guard. By this afternoon, dozens of Americans from all walks of life had made the walk to Section 60 to visit SSG Alan W. Shaw. Veterans. Families. Complete strangers. People who had never met Alan, but chose to honor him anyway. For one day on social media, people put aside the constant noise and negativity and came together for something bigger than themselves. My notifications filled with photos, kind messages, prayers, and stories from people honoring not just Alan, but so many of our fallen heroes. I don’t think people fully understand what moments like this mean to Gold Star families. The fear is never just losing them. It’s losing them slowly over time as the world moves on and fewer people remember their name. But today showed me that Alan will never be forgotten. After years of watching social media reward some of the worst parts of humanity, today gave me a reminder that the good is still out there too. Thank you to every single person who stopped by to visit Alan today, said his name, shared his story, or took a moment to honor the fallen. This right here is the America Alan knew and loved enough to fight and die for. And today, y’all showed us all that it’s still here and it’s still worth fighting for. 🇺🇸

@infantrydort @B30_603 Ms Gabbard's heart is beautiful. All she is going thru, yet she took time to give an amazing gift to a gold star wife. May Ms Gabbard be blessed for her kindness.

This may be one of the greatest X things I've ever witnessed. No joke.

Me: at a Japanese aquarium. peaceful day, families everywhere, soft piano music. then I notice one employee SPEED WALKING past us carrying bucket. Employee: Excuse me. another employee runs by, then another. suddenly whole aquarium staff moving with Avengers-level urgency. Me: ... Friend: Something happened. we follow crowd to penguin section. absolute chaos, one penguin missing. not metaphorically, ACTUALLY escaped. staff members whispering intensely into walkie-talkies. tiny child beside me: The criminal has escaped. Me: WHY DID HE SAY IT LIKE THAT. then I spot the penguin. bro is BOOKING IT down hallway at shocking speed. sliding on stomach around corners like furry torpedo. staff chasing respectfully. one employee holding fish like hostage negotiator. Employee: Kenta please. PENGUIN'S NAME IS KENTA. Kenta ignores authority completely, runs directly into souvenir shop. now people buying keychains while rogue penguin commits grand theft atmosphere. finally old aquarium worker appears. everyone parts ways dramatically. this man kneels down calmly. pulls out single sardine. Kenta stops immediately. walks over with zero shame. Old Worker: Enough adventure. penguin allows himself to be carried away like drunk friend after party. crowd applauds. Friend whispering: He'll do it again. Honestly? absolutely.

Remember the guy who wouldn't take the flag pole down on his Virginia property awhile back? You might remember the news story several months ago about a crotchety old man in Virginia who defied his local Homeowners Association and refused to take down the flag pole on his property along with the large American flag he flew on it. Now we learn who that old man was. On June 15, 1919, Van T. Barfoot was born in Edinburg, Texas . That probably didn't make news back then. But twenty five years later, on May 23, 1944, near Cyrano, Italy, That same Van T. Barfoot, who had in 1940 enlisted in the U.S. Army, set out alone to flank German machine gun positions from which gunfire was raining down on his fellow soldiers. His advance took him through a minefield but having done so, he proceeded to single-handedly take out three enemy machine gun positions, returning with 17 prisoners of war. And if that weren’t enough for a day's work, he later took on and destroyed three German tanks sent to retake the machine gun positions. That probably didn’t make much news either, given the scope of the war, but it did earn Van T. Barfoot, who retired as a Colonel after also serving In Korea and Vietnam , a well deserved Congressional Medal of Honor. What did make news was his Neighborhood Association's quibble with how the 90-year-old Veteran chose to fly the American flag outside his suburban Virginia home. Seems the HOA rules said it was OK to fly a flag on a house-mounted bracket, but, for decorum, items such as Barfoot's 21-foot flagpole were "unsuitable." Van Barfoot had been denied a permit for the pole, but erected it anyway and was facing Court action unless he agreed to take it down. Then the HOA story made national TV, and the Neighborhood Association rethought its position and agreed to indulge this aging hero who dwelt among them. "In the time I have left", he said to the Associated Press, "I plan to continue to fly the American flag without interference." As well he should. And if any of his neighbors had taken a notion to contest him further, they might have done well to read his Medal of Honor citation first. Seems it Indicates Mr. Van Barfoot wasn't particularly good at backing down. If you've read this post and don't share it, - Guess what -You need your butt kicked. I share this with you because I don't want MY butt kicked anymore and I'm tired of seeing those who hate our country yet march in our streets, tear down our statues, burn our stores and loot our businesses have a free hand to do whatever they want. WE ONLY LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE! AND, BECAUSE OF BRAVE OLD MEN LIKE VAN BARFOOT!

Kyle Busch was driving down the road when he noticed the woman in the passenger seat next to him was wearing his hat and her reaction is priceless when she realizes

The fact that you ACTUALLY BELIEVE that Donald Trump is a "racist, fascist, criminal scumbag" reveals the following things about you: 1. You are very poorly informed about American politics. 2. You are extremely susceptible to propaganda. 3. You possess inadequate critical thinking skills. 4. You allow emotion to color your judgment in such a way as to render you wholly untrustworthy on any matter of significance.

OMgosh...this is hilarious!

Dear America, We’re more than bourbon trails, Derby racing and Corvettes. We are the Kentuckians who got rid of Mitch and Massie. You’re welcome, Kentuckians 🙌🏽

After the FBI raid, maybe you can even make it yourself.

Post the last photo of your pet, no cheating

The United States capital is in Washington D.C. for one reason almost nobody learns in school. Congress got run out of Philadelphia by its own army. In June 1783, just months after the Revolutionary War ended, around four hundred unpaid Continental soldiers marched on the Pennsylvania State House where the Continental Congress was meeting. They surrounded the building, jeered through the windows, jabbed bayonets at the doorway, and demanded their back pay. Congress turned to Pennsylvania's state government and asked them to call out the militia to disperse the mob. Pennsylvania refused. The most powerful legislative body in the new nation realized, in real time, that it had no land of its own, no soldiers of its own, and no protection from the very state that hosted it. So they did the only thing they could do. They fled in the night. That single humiliation, called the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, is the reason there is a federal district at all. The framers later wrote into the Constitution that the seat of government would never again belong to any one state. It would belong only to itself. But before that fix arrived, the capital wandered like a refugee. Including Philadelphia, which served on and off five separate times, the capital of the United States has officially sat in nine different cities. Baltimore, Maryland. Congress fled there in December 1776 when the British army was closing on Philadelphia and Washington's troops were freezing along the Delaware. They met in a tavern. Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The capital was here for exactly one day in September 1777 before Congress decided to keep running. York, Pennsylvania. They settled across the Susquehanna River for nine months. The Articles of Confederation, the country's first constitution, were drafted there. York is the only city outside the original thirteen state capitals that can credibly claim to have hosted the birth of American government. Princeton, New Jersey. After the soldiers' mutiny, Congress relocated to Nassau Hall on the Princeton College campus, where the building still has a cannonball hole from the war. Annapolis, Maryland. In December 1783, in the senate chamber of the Maryland State House, George Washington walked in, removed his sword, and resigned his commission as commander in chief of the army. He could have made himself king. Instead, he handed the war back to Congress and went home to farm. King George III, when he heard about it from across the Atlantic, reportedly said that if Washington really did that, he would be the greatest man in the world. The Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War, was ratified in that same Annapolis room a few weeks later. Trenton, New Jersey. Congress met there for a few weeks in late 1784. New York City. From 1785 to 1790, this was the seat of government. George Washington was inaugurated there on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in April 1789. The Bill of Rights was drafted there. The first Supreme Court convened there. New Yorkers fully expected to be the permanent capital forever. Then politics happened. In June 1790, Thomas Jefferson hosted a private dinner at his rented New York home. Alexander Hamilton attended. James Madison attended. Hamilton needed Southern votes for his plan to have the federal government assume the war debts of the states. Madison and Jefferson, both Virginians, wanted something in return. They wanted the capital out of the North. The deal struck over that dinner table is now called the Compromise of 1790. The federal government would absorb state debts. In exchange, the permanent capital would move to a brand new city built on the Potomac River, near Virginia, on land that did not yet exist as a city, on swampy farmland and forest that would have to be carved out of Maryland and Virginia and built from scratch. While they built it, the capital would temporarily move back to Philadelphia for ten years. George Washington personally chose the exact site. It included his own neighborhood. Mount Vernon was just down the river. The boundaries of the new district were laid out as a perfect ten mile by ten mile diamond by Andrew Ellicott and a free Black astronomer named Benjamin Banneker, the son of a former slave, who calculated the survey points using the stars. There is a quiet historical irony in the fact that the city of American government was mapped, in part, by a man whose own grandfather had been kidnapped from Africa. A French engineer named Pierre Charles L'Enfant designed the streets, the broad avenues, the placement of the Capitol on a hill and the President's House nearly two miles away connected by a long ceremonial road. He was fired within a year for being impossible to work with. His plan was used anyway. The federal government moved into Washington in November 1800. The Capitol building was unfinished. The White House was unfinished. John Adams, the second president, moved into the unfinished mansion, and his wife Abigail famously hung the laundry to dry in the empty East Room because she had nowhere else to put it. Then in August 1814, during the War of 1812, a British army marched up from the Chesapeake Bay, fought a brief and embarrassing battle at Bladensburg in which American militia ran for their lives, and walked into Washington unopposed. They burned the Capitol. They burned the White House. They burned the Treasury. President James Madison fled into Virginia. His wife Dolley refused to leave until she had cut a full length portrait of George Washington out of its frame and rolled it up to save it. That painting still hangs in the East Room today. When Congress returned to the smoking ruins of the city, a serious motion was put forward to abandon Washington forever and move the capital permanently back to Philadelphia. The vote failed by nine votes. Eighty three to seventy four. Nine votes. That is how close Washington D.C. came to ending in 1814. The diamond shape of the original district is also gone now. The Virginia side, which included most of Arlington and part of Alexandria, was given back to Virginia in 1846 because residents there felt ignored by the federal government and wanted to vote in state elections again. That is why the modern map of D.C. has a clean square edge cut out of one side. It was once the rest of the diamond. During the Civil War, Washington sat on the front line. It was surrounded on three sides by slave territory. Confederate forces came within sight of the unfinished Capitol dome at Fort Stevens in July 1864, the only time in American history a sitting president, Abraham Lincoln, came under direct enemy fire on a battlefield. He stood on a parapet to watch the fight in his stovepipe hat. A Union officer reportedly shouted at him to get down before he was shot. That officer, by some accounts, was a young captain named Oliver Wendell Holmes, who would later sit on the Supreme Court for thirty years. The Washington Monument, started in 1848, sat as an unfinished stump for over twenty years because the country ran out of money and then had a war. If you stand at the base today and look up, you can still see a faint horizontal line where the marble changes color. The bottom third was quarried before the Civil War. The top two thirds came from a different quarry decades later. It looks like a healed scar on the skyline of the city. So the next time someone asks why the capital of the United States sits where it does, the answer is not really about geography, or compromise, or Washington's hometown. The answer is that in 1783, an army of unpaid soldiers chased the United States Congress out of its own building, and a state government shrugged and watched it happen. Everything after that, the diamond on the Potomac, the burning of the city in 1814, the cannonball hole in Nassau Hall, the resignation in Annapolis, the dinner deal in New York, the missing piece given back to Virginia, the scar on the Washington Monument, all of it traces back to that single summer in Philadelphia when the founders learned the hard way that a government without ground of its own is a government on the run. They never wanted to run again.

Timeline Cleanse for an afternoon laugh: "They said you sound like an owl," prank 🦉

@MsAshBash420 Read the entire ad.

I'm so sorry to hear this is happening to you @SenLouiseLucas! Here, have some lobster.

@BarackObama @MichelleObama @ObamaFoundation I have a trash can sitting outside of my house. But thanks anyway...

Laughing so hard where my dog fell asleep 🤣🤣

@ChrisCillizza I think we need to call when a pundit gets something completely wrong a "Cillizza" It's where you perfect the art of being wrong and pretend to speak with authority about it anyway "Oh man I told everyone the Lakers would win the game tonight. I really Cillizza'd that one"